Life & Wisdom Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo

For a Nobel-winning poet who translated half of Europe into Italian, Quasimodo’s line lands like a provocation: the modern writer as border-guard. It’s less a xenophobic shrug than a warning about what gets lost when poetry chases a frictionless, “global” voice. In his mouth, “internationalism” isn’t curiosity; it’s a flattening aesthetic, the kind that swaps lived syntax for export-ready polish. The poet who “clings” isn’t merely nostalgic. He’s defensive because language is not a neutral tool - it’s a history of pressures, class, region, church bells, propaganda, and private idioms. Tradition is where those pressures remain audible.

The subtext is postwar Europe’s cultural scramble. After fascism and the Second World War, internationalist ideals sounded morally urgent: cooperation, cosmopolitan exchange, a future beyond nationalist blood myths. Quasimodo complicates that optimism from the inside. He’s suggesting that the poet’s obligation is not to the abstract “world” but to the stubborn particular: dialect, inherited forms, local memory. The claim is also a sly jab at literary fashion - at writers who mistake being legible everywhere for being meaningful anywhere.

There’s a deeper tension, too: Quasimodo the translator arguing that translation can’t be the model for original creation. You can welcome other literatures, even live among them, but your poem has to answer to your own linguistic lineage. Otherwise, “internationalism” becomes a kind of tasteful nowhere, poetry as cultural airport lounge.